


for that girl that I knew

by Helendmeyourears



Series: NileWeek2020 [2]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:41:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26344297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Helendmeyourears/pseuds/Helendmeyourears
Summary: The realization washes over Nile when she least expects it, lying under the stars on a glow-in-the-dark constellation blanket (“Sometimes, you need things even if they’re impractical. Especially if they’re impractical,” Joe had shrugged) with a notebook and Joe beside her. She bolts upright, startling Joe away from their homemade telescope.“I died,” she says.
Relationships: Nile Freeman & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani
Series: NileWeek2020 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1914307
Comments: 1
Kudos: 68





	for that girl that I knew

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Sara Bareilles's She Used To Be Mine- not a perfect parallel, but both, in essence, about women grieving who they used to be

The realization washes over Nile when she least expects it, lying under the stars on a glow-in-the-dark constellation blanket (“Sometimes, you need things even if they’re impractical. Especially if they’re impractical,” Joe had shrugged) with a notebook and Joe beside her. She bolts upright, startling Joe away from their homemade telescope.

“I died,” she says.

Joe looks at her, brows furrowed.

“Yes?” he says, like it’s a question. It had been, until now, the answer flooding in and sweeping her off stable ground.

“No, I mean- like, yeah, technically, my body died and came back. But me? Nile, who I was, what I was doing, that whole life- that’s gone. That’s not coming back.”

She shakes her head, disbelievingly.

“The last things I said to my family- that’s just it. If I don’t go back, I’ll never have anything else with them. It’ll be just as if I really died. And all my plans, the dreams- I can’t ever do them, not as myself, as that Nile. I’ll have to pretend to be someone else. I’ll have to keep going, but she never will. She was gone the second my life was, wasn’t she?”

She turns to Joe, adrift, eyes stinging, when an utterly new horror occurs to her.

“I won’t ever be able to get a dog, will I?”

“There aren’t any rules against pets,” Joe says, cautiously.

But they both know it’s not likely. The way they move, the things they do- it wouldn’t be safe for an animal, let alone a plant. It wouldn’t be fair. None of it is fair. 

And it feels ridiculous, after the thought of the loss of her family, to cry about not getting a pet. But it’s not really about the dog itself. Or rather it is, but not just that. It’s erosion, the formation of the Grand Canyon, the final push of a constant stream of tiny, terrible things that have worn at her since she first died. And she feels them all in her chest, tightening her throat.

Joe puts his arm around her shoulder and pulls her close, an anchor in her struggle against the tide.

“I...can’t say I know exactly what you’re going through,” he says, quietly. “It wasn’t the same for us. When I died, if I disappeared- back then, it wasn’t so uncommon. Especially in war. I could leave and never know anything else about home, so long as I never returned there or kept up on street gossip. I could be myself, almost anywhere, and never have anyone question how, so much as why.”

“Must be nice, not having to fake IDs everywhere you go,” she says. She doesn’t want to sniffle, but the alternative is letting her nose run on Joe’s nice leather jacket, so she does. Joe pats her shoulder twice in response, taking a moment before he speaks again.

“Yes and no. But we all have our own challenges in this life, things that make it uniquely harder on us to live it. You have your IDs and social media...Nicky has his catholicism, Booker’s french.”

She gives him as dry a look as she can manage through her still-watery eyes, and he smiles, a small, gentle upturn of his lips.

“But you’re right, this immortality, it is a sort of ending to the normal life before. I won’t pretend otherwise. I had my own dreams-”

He glances to the stars then, his eyes full of them, a galaxy reflected within itself.

“All I can say is that you do have choices in it, in what happens after, and you have time to make them. With us to back you up.”

“I think,” she says, before taking a breath of the cold night air to steel herself. “I think I want to go back home.”

“Then we’ll take you there,” Joe says, as if it’s that simple. Maybe one day, it will be.

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback is welcome and appreciated, thank you for reading!
> 
> As always, you can catch me on tumblr @astral-kaysani


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